Literate and nerdy. By Michael James Boyle.
My wife, Sasha, shared this audio clip with me this morning and I discovered 2018’s version of The Dress. The clip is a high pitched robotic voice repeating “Yanny” over and over… Or wait, it’s a low pitched man’s voice repeating, “Laurel.” I decided to dig a little deeper.
I’m trying not to get into the practice of spouting off at people I don’t know on Twitter who are, mostly, just venting to each other, but I’m seeing a continuing and building pattern in lefty spaces that frustrates the hell out of me. So rather than try to speak up to people who really don’t need some random dude poking his head in to #wellactually them, I’m going to do my own venting and shout into the void here.
The thing I’m finding most frustrating, after more than a week of extreme frustration, is a thing many conservative allies are doing, and it is this: the idea that any opposition to an action by Trump is illegitimate if that action is something another Republican might do.
Everyone who’s throwing a fit right now, or perhaps even worse, tuning out because they don’t like any of the options in American politics, please stop and take a breath.
Over the last few years there has been a fresh kerfuffle over game reviews frequently enough that they have all more or less rolled together into one ongoing undulation of confusion over what any of it means. Many trends are at fault, from a general confusion between product reviews and criticism, to the unhealthy way in which Metacritic scores rule the lives of many studios, but beyond all of that, I think, is something deeper. People simply don’t understand what grades mean.
Neil Gaiman has a lovely conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro in the New Statesman. It begins with a discussion of how and if genre is an important concept before delving into wider topics like the fostering (or discouraging) of creativity in societies and how stories connect you to the past.
This isn’t new ground, but every few days the world of geeks, techies, and enthusiasts seems to turn inward and heave a collective sigh. You see geeks (or nerds or whatever self-applied name you prefer)—we who pride ourselves on our enthusiasm for things, who identify as the underdog, who revel in our trajectory from close-minded communities that didn’t get us into welcoming utopias—are host to some pretty rough shit.
Every now and again, someone writes something so boneheaded, so hurtful, that you have to wonder if even commenting on it is giving it too much credit. Fortunately, one of the upsides of not yet having a readership is that I don’t have to concern myself with the possibility that I might send traffic anyone’s way. Nevertheless… ugh, fine, Ruth Graham at Slate thinks you should be embarrassed if you are an adult who likes Young Adult (YA) fiction.
I’ve been working on this website for quite a while on and off. It’s somewhat nervous-making to push the button and set the server to allow traffic in. At some point, though, you’ve just got to do it. So here we are. Cheers!
The other day I wrote about how China Miéville’s novel, The City & The City conveys the way that the little affiliative signs we give off are more than just petty posturing. One aspect of this I didn’t address head-on is how this interacts with cultural privilege. Today I read a very well-presented article about how this sort of thing plays out in the context of trying to get more women and minorities into areas traditionally dominated by white men, and it made me regret that I didn’t cover this better in my article on the book.
Speaking of Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, preliminary signs are not good. That’s unfortunate. As someone with a scientific background who is often frustrated with mainstream journalism’s tendency to abdicate responsibility for determining the truth of anything, the pitch sounds great.
Yesterday, Facebook bought Oculus VR, the scrappy virtual reality pioneer. Oculus went from a $2.4 million Kickstarter in 2012 to single-handedly bringing VR from a bad ’90s novelty to an imminent gaming reality. The immediate reaction was, to say the least, negative.
A brief programming note: If you were subscribed to my RSS feed just now, you probably got annoyed by seeing every item come back up as unread. The reason for this is I made a slight change to the way I generate the feeds which should, I hope, result in fewer future annoyances.
The courts finally decided in favor of Google in the long running court case between the tech company who thrives on indexing, and commoditizing, the world’s information and the Author’s Guild over scanning and indexing copyrighted books.
Thanks to Marco Arment I’m now aware that Neil Young is promoting the most recent in a well-intentioned, but misguided, quest for a better audio format. These come from a true sense that most people these days don’t hear audio in all its glory and, worse, that it can be very hard for even people who do have good equipment to get recordings that make the most of it.
Via Marco Arment, I encountered this interesting blog post from Dr. Bunsen (Seth Brown) on “Coffee Science.” His goal was to determine experimentally what among a few common differences in technique actually had a measurable effect on his friend’s enjoyment of the cup. Because how good your coffee tastes is such a fun subject, I think these experiments provide a nice little platform to think about how this kind of thing plays out when we try to write about scientific approaches to more serious subjects.
The other night I was marveling over the connections between people I follow (but don’t know personally) on Twitter. The details aren’t really important, but it was a scene repeated all the time. Musician links to a work of art made by someone I follow due to their work in games who is connected to a cartoonist who’s work I love and also via another connection to someone who makes software I love. Et cetera.